> Were they told not to be critical of the

> Chinese little girls team?

Very probably, yes. We may have to wait until our journalists get home to find out what they were permitted to say, and what they were not allowed to report.

If you think you've rendered a objective, value-neutral summary of this particular manifestation of "pop art," you might want to reread the piece. Phrases like "selling out" certainly imply a common post-Romantic view of art and the artist, and the question you raise of whether an artist may become "corrupted" by the demands of the marketplace doesn't suggest a neutral perspective, either. I could go on to pull especially provocative sentences, even unpack whole paragraphs, starting with the third one, and going word for word to the bitter end, but I think everyone would rather I didn't.

Now, it's entirely possible that the view of art you're espousing in this piece -- including but not limited the importance of traditional art institutions (the villa, the palace, the university, the museum) and the value of an "old-school art career" -- is so culturally entrenched that it requires neither analysis nor defense. (Yet if that's the case, why are some of your readers, myself included, crying foul?) A post-Romantic view of art, especially in terms of its apparent hostility to Commerce, might even be a foundational assumption behind "Beyond the Multiplex" itself, in which case I've touched on something potentially more problematic than a quibble with a film review.

Interesting review. The most obvious comment is that this sort of art -- divorced from tradition, without intellectual or moral reference points -- is what happens when art education is effectively abolished. You can see this sort of thing in the rural American South, where folk artists, most of them equally devoid of canonical knowledge, assemble their own brand of "Alleged" art out of the cultural and physical materials surrounding them: Old tires, rusted automobile parts, road signs and fundamentalist theology.

But there's another, less obvious point to be made here, pertaining to your response. No one ever complains that Velasquez "sold out," or Rembrandt, or Gainsborough, even though the vast majority of their work was executed on behalf of 1) the church, 2) a member of the nobility, or 3) a wealthy merchant. (Da Vinci spent most of his time designing military weaponry: How does that play nowadays?) Prior to the nineteenth century in the West, and continuing almost to the present day in other parts of the world, artistic traditions have essentially concerned the glorification of institutional or personal power. Your insistence that art is somehow concerned with "self-expression," or that it exists or ought to exist independently of commercial demands, itself betrays a certain ignorance of our artistic tradition -- and specifically, of its cultural context.

What is the difference, then, between a work of art that commemorates the military prowess of Emperor Napoleon, and one that commemorates the corporate power of Nike (besides the unfortunate fact that military prowess is usually more lethal than corporate power)? What is the difference between a work of art that presents the institutional values of Pepsi Cola, and another work of art that presents the institutional values of a university that pays said artist's salary? What does the Whitney Biennial celebrate, and what does it sell?

I think O'Hehir may be working with too narrow a definition of "political" filmmaking. I'm not entirely sure what his definition might be, but the most common error along these lines is to think that political filmmaking connotes endorsement of a specific partisan or ideological agenda. In this view, political filmmaking is agitprop and nothing else.

O'Hehir would be right to note that Nolan doesn't seem interested in this sort of endeavor. (Shyamalan's latest, on the other hand ....) But many critics -- some thoughtful, some merely reactive -- are very heavily invested in it, especially during an election year, and they tend to view a work of art that might conceivably be interpreted as even mildly favorable to George W. Bush as abject betrayal of the cause. For my part, I can't find a political agenda, or anything else of note, in homicidal trifles like MEMENTO, INSOMNIA or (heaven preserve us) THE PRESTIGE.

Yet in the BATMAN films Nolan does work with contemporary political issues as backdrop and subtext to the drama, if only because he doesn't have a choice. Nolan wants to demystify and demythologize a comic-book hero, and he can't do it without placing this character in a specific, fairly detailed social context. The political issues and debates in these films arise from this initial decision.

The real reason we're talking about THE DARK KNIGHT and not the other movies O'Hehir discussed is that most of us who happen to live outside of New York City will never have a chance to see these other films, in a theater or on home video. Maybe the reason we're so defensive is that THE DARK KNIGHT is the closest thing to visionary cinema we're likely ever to see.